The Amazing Mages

Miss Vitronica Mage is the youngest of four children who have all mysteriously disappeared on the eve of their 21st birthdays. Now about to turn 21 herself, she comes to Bouragner Felpz in a desperate attempt to save herself, but what Felpz discovers when he investigates the case proves to be far more intricate than what first appears. And Corianne, his faithful ward and biographer, is forced to take a much more direct role than she would like, considering there could be a demon involved!

It should be fairly obvious (it certainly isn’t a secret) that these stories owe a lot to the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, namely his Sherlock Holmes series. I wanted to write fantasy, but not the traditional sword-and-sorcery sort. I remembered Holmes saying something to the effect that he had never met a murderer who could fly, and I thought: oh, but if there’s magic involved, there could be! And thus inspired, I ran off to write my own mysteries, but this time with magic involved.

I’m mentioning all this because I don’t think it’s really fair not to. People tend to notice similarities in my work with other, greater writers. Some of these similarities are subconscious (I had read their book many times and certain themes became ingrained in my mind and popped in without my meaning them to), some of them were accidental (I had never even heard of this person or read their books: the similarities were simply coincidental), and some were deliberate. These I feel I should be honest about, since I was consciously helped along by some other person’s work. And I’m mentioning it now because this story was directly inspired by one of my very favorite Sherlock Holmes tales. I won’t tell you which one—I don’t want to spoil the surprise!—but fans of Holmes should easily recognize the… let’s call it the armature of this story. The details, (the flesh, skin and hair,) however, are entirely my own. And the solution, I am happy to say, is actually rather different.